Wicked 2 wasn't walk-out-of-the-theater horrible... but it wasn't good either.
Why did I go see it, you might ask? Because all three of my daughters are singers, we enjoyed the stage play, and the current movie is killing it at the box office. Plus, now you don't have to.
Since I had to sit through it, I figured I might as well get something out of it. I can tell you that the first Wicked was like Gone With the Wind compared to the rather boring and endless second one, titled Wicked: For Good.
Ariana Grande can be fetching at times, but in the modern-day Hollywood way, she's done something to her lips, and you find yourself staring at them in puzzlement instead of listening to whatever forgettable song she's singing. While she and her co-star Cynthia Erivo both have pipes, the tunes are poor to middling, and you will have forgotten them by the time you leave the theater. The first installment had Defying Gravity, which is actually quite a show-stopper, but this one had only For Good, which could also be titled, For Sleep.
The supposed romantic love triangle is about as hot as lukewarm coffee because there is zero chemistry between the male lead and the two food-starved ladies. The obvious real romance is between Grande and Erivo, and watching them singing into each other's faces, inches apart, is the kind of cinematic moment where you cover your eyes or turn away to look at the wall.The talking animal plot is so dumb it's barely worth getting into, so I won’t. I’ll just say that it seemed tacked on and somewhat random. Why is the brain trust of Oz targeting sentient beasts? Evidently, simply because they can.
Meanwhile, the inestimable and always fabulous Jeff Goldblum is once again inestimable and fabulous — and seems to be in a completely different movie than everyone else. I have no idea what the Wizard's motivations were, and [SPOILER ALERT] I have no idea why he went from evil fascist dictator to meek supplicant in less than ten seconds of film time. I guess Ariana is just that powerful — although they certainly didn't back that up in the script.
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In fairness, the visuals were absolutely stunning, and you could smell the massive money behind virtually every opulent shot. The camera work and the special effects continue to become more mind-boggling with each new Hollywood blockbuster; that being said, we’ve become used to somewhat realistic talking animals, and they quickly become rather… boring. If the story isn’t compelling, then what the goat says isn’t all that interesting, to be honest.
After the show, I was talking with my kids — who, although they really wanted to like Wicked 2, actually were pretty critical — about how back in the day, there was no streaming, no VCRs, and no DVDs. When I was little, The Wizard of Oz would come on TV once a year, on Thanksgiving, and that’s the only way you could see it. We agreed that today, Thanksgiving, we would watch the amazing original since it’s been many years since any of us has seen it.
Final note: For many years, my wife and I operated a clothes business, and one time there was a convention in Culver City, a section of Los Angeles where several movie studios are located, including Sony and MGM (now under the banner of Amazon/MGM Studios, because everything is Amazon these days). We met our clothing line rep at the expo in an old musty hotel where supposedly the original Munchkins stayed, and what we heard was pretty wild. Evidently, the Munchkins partied hard, like it was 1999. Some have denied that the debauchery ever occurred, but rumors persist that things got pretty nuts.
Wicked: For Good has pulled in almost $250 million at the box office so far, despite the off-putting, strange antics of its stars in press junkets (which have now been cancelled, supposedly because Grande caught COVID). I would not call the film a train wreck, and it does show the incredible power of the images Hollywood can conjure, but what it lacks is some far less technological: a storyline that we can relate to and that moves us. Tinseltown has shown time and time again that movies with far smaller budgets and far less elaborate sets can affect us — when they have heart.
This one tried to… but came up short.
